Elizabeth Bishop: A Conversation about Her Poetry

00:00:00 I'm edner sessan director of the heing center and I want to welcome you to today's program on Elizabeth Bishop that was organized by the chair of our poetry uh program David pollins who will introduce the uh participants just to tell you the programs we have planned on April 13th we have a program on music emotion and mind on April 27th the program is on curiosity and

00:00:32 ignorance and uh I think it's May 10th or something like that we have a program uh what's that one no it's not on memory on forget should be should be on memory uh oh it's a program on a subject we all need to learn more about which is synthetic and uh systemic biology thank

00:01:08 you well welcome everybody to our talk today about Elizabeth Bishop uh we have a fabulous group of poets and Scholars and editors all deeply connected to the work of Elizabeth Bishop I'll introduce them uh Bonnie Costello is a professor at Boston University uh she's here on my right she's the author of Maran and more imaginary possessions Elizabeth Bishop questions of Mastery and the general editor of the selected letters of Marian Moore her

00:01:39 more recent literary studies include shifting ground and planets on tables Miss Costello is currently working on pronoun trouble Ain and others in the first person plural Alice Quinn is the executive director of The Poetry Society of America and an adjunct professor at The Graduate School of the Arts Columbia University she was the Poetry editor of the New Yorker for two decades and before that was an editor at Alfred kop Miss Quinn compiled the collection of Elizabeth Bishop's unpublished work in Edgar alen

00:02:10 Poe and the Jukebox uncollected poems drafts and fragments which appeared in 2006 she's currently preparing a collection of Elizabeth Bishop's journals and notebooks Lloyd Schwarz is the Frederick s Troy professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston in addition to being a poet and literary critic Mr Schwarz is the classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix and a regular commentator on NPR's fresh air in 1994 he received the pullet surprise for criticism for his

00:02:42 writing on music he is co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop and her art a collection of essays on the poet and the library of America's edition of her collected works Elizabeth Bishop poems pros and letters his own poems have been included in the best American poetry and the pushard prize anthologies Jean Valentine sitting between Lloyd and Alice her first book dream Barker and other poems won the Yale younger poets prize in 1965 dor in the mountain new and

00:03:14 collected poems 1965 2003 won the national book award in 2004 and her most recent book break the glass was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize Miss Valentine has received grants and fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation she's been awarded the Shelly Memorial award for the Poetry Society of America and the Wallace Stevens award by the American Academy of poets she was the state poet of New York from 2008 to

00:03:48 2010 so if people saw the announcement for today's event they can see that attention was drawn to Elizabeth Bishop's powers of observation which has been noted by um many of the people who've read her poet poetry closely and I'm just going to make a couple of comments about that um I'll just quote some things that she has said in referring to her maternal grandmother she says my grandmother had a glass eye blue almost like her other one and this

00:04:20 made her especially vulnerable and precious to me my father was dead and my mother was away in a sanatorium until I was teased out of it I used to ask grandmother when I said goodbye to promise me not to die before I came home and then about her paternal grandfather she said he was walleyed at least one eye turned the wrong way which made him endlessly interesting to me and then in a letter to her from Robert LEL he says no eye in the world

00:04:52 has seen what yours has and starting with that I'll turn to our participants to respond if I could just add one little anecdote um Robert LOL introduced uh Elizabeth Bishop uh when she was giving a reading at the Guggenheim Museum and he referred to her famous eye and when she got when she got on stage uh she announced that the famous eye will now put on her

00:05:24 glasses we were trying to think before uh downstairs where was that we read Mary McCarthy of Vass her classmates's description of Bishop's Eye as like a great magnifying glass and and she said of course the forfeit would would be that you'd have to look at everything with that eye so I think she thought Bishop was a little touchy well I'll I'll play sort of U Counterpoint to this just a bit because uh I was drawn to

00:05:56 Bishop as a great describer uh I had been reading marann Moore for a long time and MaryAnn Moore as probably some of you know was kind of a mentor to Elizabeth Bishop uh and uh I have always loved description in poetry um but I think one of the things that happened is that Bishop was such a great describer uh that people's highest tribute to her was her accuracy uh and they missed often How Deeply intelligent her poems are how

00:06:28 much psychological res resence they have um when I teach Bishop I love to uh pass around a New Yorker cartoon that Steinberg uh Saul Steinberg did and it's of a man in the middle of a spiral and at the end of the Spiral he's got a pen in his hand and the end of the Spiral there's a landscape you know but it spins back to him and that always made me think about Bishop that that that to describe something is always to find out something about yourself um to uh to um

00:07:02 come back to the self in some new way that you can't know about the self only by turning inward but it's this constant engagement with the sorum with the visual field especially in Bishop's case I think that uh that that that enriches that knowledge and uh it can be self forgetful of course uh loss of self through engagement with the with the visual world but um I think ultimately the knowledge of the self comes back and so um uh I think often critics there was

00:07:34 a a kind of um not damning with faint praise but a but a a lack of recognition of the profundity of her poetry because there was so much attention to its visual accuracy at first so it's just a little Counterpoint maybe to to and just to go back to what Alice was saying about the what Mary McCarthy said I it made me think of this passage in cruso in England which is uh if you don't know

00:08:04 the poem one of Bishop's most ambitious and one of her longest poems and it's a poem in the voice of Robinson cruso it's also it seems to me one of her most autobiographical poems and there's this amazing moment like kind of chilling moment where Robinson cruso says and and and part of the autobiographical background is that Bishop lived in Brazil for many years almost 20 years you know you could call

00:08:37 it an exile and you could call it a kind of Salvation in some ways but she says but he says cruso says I'd have nightmares of other Islands stretching away from mine Infinities of islands Islands spawning islands like frogs eggs turning into pows of islands knowing that I had to live on each and everyone eventually for ages registering their Flora their FAA their geography so that

00:09:10 that sense that the the price of seeing everything so clearly is that you had to see everything and and there was no way of stopping uh I think Jean is going to read you you were thinking of reading North Haven the poem to Robert LEL but um in Bishop's last notebook um her last formal notebook there other little um little notebook she carried around but

00:09:41 uh she is up early in the morning in North Haven sitting on the porch at about 6:00 and she's decided to take the uh Wildflower guide and to write down the name of every flower that she can see from the porch and it's about this many flowers but it's preceded by her writing I want now that it's too late to learn the name of everything she really did have that

00:10:11 Delight Bonnie talked about critics praising Bishop's accuracy and not her depth and there's a wonderful passage in a draft that I think Alice discovered or found found at at Vasser of some sort of lecture that or article that Bishop was going to give and never finished um it's called um writing

00:10:42 poetry is impossible is impossible and and and she says in this and I think it's this is the this is the the statement that we should all remember Bishop making because it's I think it's a profound it's profoundly self-re reflexive she says she talks about the qualities she admires in the Poetry she likes

00:11:13 most are accuracy right spontaneity and mystery and what an amazing yeah conglomeration of different and and yet overlapping things and and of course it's very it's very funny about I mean she's sort of so famous for being accurate and yet we know those of us who

00:11:44 have really have studied her poems that she was perfectly capable of making things up and was very nervous wat bulbs and things like that right yeah and has anybody ever seen an 80 watt light bulb well she in in one of her really greatest poems uh in the waiting room she talks about this issue of the National Geographic which was the issue that came out on her 7eventh birthday

00:12:14 and she describes in detail all these things that are in that issue and they're not in that issue uh and that that people have written articles about you know the half a dozen issues of the National Geographic that came out the the year of her seventh birthday where a lot of these things are there but they're not in the February 1918 issue but it's true to memory it's

00:12:44 true to memory memory does that too right but she but yeah except that she knew she was making this up and as Alice said she was really worried about the New Yorker fact Checkers and and and they did check and she how just right right right right but I heard they talking well You' got what's the thing when you have time wrong with the cruso and World Andis

00:13:15 anism and she said I know yes right she has in that Palm in cruso in England she has Robinson cruso trying to remember a line that is a famous line by woodsworth and The New Yorker fact Checkers pointed out that woodsworth came much later you know the next Century or you know in the next Century from Robinson cruso that's the point right and she said yeah I

00:13:48 know I I um I love the tense of I shant have lied even losing you I shant have lied again it's very bizarre who says shant anyway but where is that yeah right where is that in time right right that was a throwback wasn't it to her grandparents do you think well same as the phrase safe as houses that's a very oldfashioned phras My grandmother used to say safe as houses really oh yeah but and your grandmother was from England English my

00:14:22 English grandmother oh this was not the Canadian no not the Canadian one the English one yeah yeah so one of things that we were talking about the temporality of um of the cruso poem and uh when we if we think about Bishop as a visual poet primarily um uh we not only want to remind ourselves of of the profundity of the accumulated meaning uh that's coming through detail rather than some imposition of symbols into the poem

00:14:55 but um but we also um I think want to beware Ware that while she's a great describer she also has a a sense of time in motion and often her Landscapes will be surprisingly they'll be like time lapses you know you can feel spring happening as she's describing a hill uh we're often in this kind of space it's half time and half space you know that is the space of the Mind partly um and there are many poems that do that and

00:15:25 you know it's it's it's a little unsettling at times because you get disoriented in you know what is the uh what the sequence the standard here you know or the uh the measure uh but she's so interested in that the side of psychology of space and um but maybe disoriented is okay bigger pardon maybe disoriented is okay well it's a place of Discovery certainly right yeah and I'm thinking of that uh distorted and revealed Darwin passage you know yeah

00:15:56 yeah did somebody have that to read that that I do have to yeah I didn't mean to no no this is from a letter to Ann Stevenson who wrote the first book on Bishop and sent her lots of questions in Brazil and Bishop sent her back a a a very significant manifestly important letter about seven pages long and this is a passage oh this is a bit long but I think it's worth it it's not terribly long um just the gap between the

00:16:27 observed world and and the unknown uh the psychic one is something that disturbs Bishop in her early work and something that only long experience helped her to overcome 30 years later she's able to speak as if there were no conflict there is no split this is uh Bishop uh dreams works of art some glimpses of moments of

00:16:59 empathy is it catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full face but that seems enormously important I can't believe we are wholly irrational and I do admire Darwin but reading Darwin one admires the beautiful solid case being buil up of his endless heroic observations I tell us

00:17:31 almost unconscious or automatic and then comes a sudden relaxation a forgetful phrase and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking sees the lonely young man his eyes fixed on facts and minute details sinking or sliding gidy off into the unknown what one seems to want in art she goes on in experiencing it is the

00:18:02 same thing that is necessary for its creation a self forgetful perfectly useless concentration it's good isn't it but when you said disorienting I thought of them yeah thank you and you know one of the things I love about that passage that you reinforced in the way you really performed it for us is how she's always in the moment when she's writing so that there are all these injections the parentheses the questioning of what

00:18:34 she's just asserted so that that you know there's so many ways that Bishop achieves that in poetry sometimes by using um a word like here uh where you just become very present in whatever the thought process is and uh I think even even there when she's answering a question from a literary critic you feel her kind of thinking it through a new uh so it's very exciting it's like her poems in that way well you you you

00:19:04 remind me of another really famously great passage in Bishop the end of uh at the fish houses uh she's visiting in Nova Scotia and she uh has this kind of um Epiphany at the at the end of the palm and where she's uh uh she's dipping her hand in the cold Atlantic and and it's as if the water

00:19:37 were a transmutation of fire and then this is the conclusion of the poem it is like what we imagine knowledge to be dark salt clear moving utterly free drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world derived from the rocky breasts forever flowing and drawn and since our knowledge is

00:20:08 historical flowing and flown where she's really kind of playing with grammar flown is not the past tense of flowing yeah but it's it's it's it's everything is moving nothing is static right and and her poems are have that quality that and it's really and it's kind of a quality and I think it's one of her great qualities one of the great qualities in her poems is that

00:20:41 she is living through them it's not just something and you as as you said before and you've written wonderfully about her questioning in in poems that nothing is fixed right and life is something we experience as something constantly changing and never simple and and I think there's an Embrace of that so that the skepticism is not a negative skepticism modernism's skepticism can be

00:21:11 very negative and hers is a an interrogative mode of skepticism more than a a negative harsh rupture and as you've said also I think it's a way of bringing herself home it's a way of finding out the questions are ways of coming in I love that you know Franny Blau her friend quoted in I think it was the oral biography she said uh it was later in life that Bishop said to her I think we're all I think the world is a mess and we're all sub primitive but we have to be gay in spite of it right was

00:21:43 kind of um you know that passage in the poem llo um it is like what we imagine knowledge to be is embedded in her notebooks from the trip that she took um to Nova Scotia to raggedy Island in that place uh her publisher was pursuing her with the copies of her first book and she escaped to Nova Scotia and she always made it very hard for her H mlin

00:22:14 Editor to do anything right and so anyhow she passed on the ferry the sanatorium where her mother had been incarcerated from the time she was five until she graduated from vaster and in the notebooks she writes um I past the sanatorium where mother was I I I I I hadn't prepared for this which really seems amazing when you read it I mean that's the way you get to that place and and then following that almost immediately she writes it is it is like

00:22:45 what we imagine knowledge to be so I think it has a kind of tragic undertone or overtone for her and in that same trip in the notebook she has the millions of grains are black white tan and Rose mixed with quartz grain Rose an amethyst from her poem her self-portrait poem Sandpiper which is such a great I think some of that power of observation that we've been commenting on has to do probably with a

00:23:16 vigilance um so perhaps we think she ought to have anticipated passing the sanitarium on the way to the island but she wasn't conscious of it she wasn't thinking about it and yet some part of her mind was probably prepared and yet also shocked by that experience passing by you know that gives me a chance to quote something that I found so fascinating when I these are all from these are little quotes from from an early notebook um that starts in cudy hunk which is where godold uh account says

00:23:50 Shakespeare set the Tempest and cudy hunk this little island off of New Bedford and she went there with her her friend the only man in her life other than her friend Tom waying Bob sver who um was the brother of of a friend Barbara chzn I think from Vasser and he loved her and gave her his fraternity pin and he wanted to marry her and he killed himself and she got a postcard 3 days after he died saying go to hell Elizabeth I mean it was it was one of her early really horrible tragedies but

00:24:23 she she quotes him and you can see how much she loves other people's observations and and this this again goes back to Sandpiper um Bob said it n tuck at once the water where the waves come in on a coar rolling gravel that it sounded like fat sputtering in a pan the water behind Mrs Crane's house coming in in short sliding waves on Sand he said sounded like someone shoveling snow well

00:24:55 this turns up in Sandpiper this is 193 four 1962 Sandpiper you know the little Sandpiper running along the beach hisses like fat on his left and interrupting a sheet of interrupting water I mean these images and she really thought in images yeah and they stayed with her for forever and um the entries about New York City in the Depression years are fantastic and here's one that makes me

00:25:27 think of of the the pacing that you talked about remember the little um essay that she wrote about the geese flying overhead in Vasser and she's you know the musical ter some of them are hanging back a little it's like a rubat in music and then she describes the whole migration as kind of having an invisible net around it and that always seems to me the kind of rhyme the kind of dappled rhyme and the pacing that she's after in her poems but this this

00:25:58 this I think is fascinating the other day and speaks to what you said before I realized it the other day before I realized it I saw a man winding a barber pole the iron poles in the city must be electric but this one wasn't a large Keyhole just below the stripe section and he wound it sounded like a clock the pole was striking up slowly the stripes mounting with effort gradually faster

00:26:29 and faster fantastic so we come back to the power of her accurate eye I mean there's no questioning of that I mean it's absolutely there um and the pacing the way she's written it she gives you how she took it in I just love that there's there's a little moment she in in in one of the letters that she's writing to an Stevenson you know Bishop was so kind of famously reticent about her

00:26:59 personal life and but here was this young American poet living in England writing a book about her and asking her all sorts of questions and she actually responds to these questions and she kind of provides and it's really great information for all of us who are interested in her she provides so much personal detail but there there is this one absolutely chilling moment in this

00:27:29 letter to Anne Stevenson she gets to 1934 and this is her whole comment about 1934 met mm marann Moore met mm mother died graduated yeah it's like the on the front of her notebook from the years she was consultant to the library of con poetry consultant on the front of the

00:28:00 notebook it says 1950 just about my worst comma so far well maybe this is a good moment I don't know if uh we have time to read a poem or true but um the poem that I had thought I might uh read to the group today is a poem called The Bite since we're talking about Bishop's um diary entries and so on uh the bite is a I think a relevant poem it's uh

00:28:31 about uh a bite BHT is a uh a kind of landscape uh structure in uh Florida the Key West bite is a kind of uh enclosing of water it's kind of like a bay it's a little small enclosure um but of course it's also a pun um the bite um but uh the right underneath the tile of the PO of the poem The Bite we have uh rather uncharacteristically I think on my

00:29:03 birthday and it's a descriptive poem there's nothing about her birthday in the rest of the poem but uh anyone who knows Bishop will know that um she wrote a letter to Robert LEL while she was in Key West um and said the water at uh the Key West bite looks like blue glass sorry blue gas uh G says the the water at uh at the bite looks like blue gas the harbor is

00:29:35 always a mess here junky little boats all piled up some hung with sponges and always a few half sunk or splintered up from the most recent hurricane it reminds me a little of my desk so uh so you have to keep that in mind as you listen to this descriptive poem of of the bite um and there's so many things I love about this poem certainly the way that uh this uh kind of scanning of the surface of of the scene um leads to this more inward kind

00:30:08 of reflection eventually I love that about it but I also love just uh as Alice suggested Bishop loved names of things and she loved uh she was quite the fisher woman uh or fisherman and so she loved nautical vocabulary so there are great words like Jack straw gaffs and you know things that if you're not a boat person you have to go and and look up and um so there's that marvelous sense of vocabulary and it's it's also a a marvelous poem because it is on the

00:30:39 one hand frightening in places uh close to even suicide all kinds of imagery but it's also very funny um and and and so there's this pulling back from um something that's quite dark um there is this vividness of the of the of the of the scene at at the same time there's a kind of dreamlike quality to the poem so I'll just read it um at low

00:31:09 tide like this how sheer the water is white crumbling ribs of Marl protrude and glare and the boats are dry the pilings dry as matches absorbing rather than being absorbed the water in the bite doesn't wet anything the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible one can smell it turning to gas so we could be in a Sylvia Plath Palm at

00:31:39 this point right um if one were bodair one would probably hear it turning to marima music so there's a swerve right the um uh um the little ochre dredge at work off the end of the dock already play the dry perfectly offbeat claves the birds are outsize and here comes the comic part and I think it's sort of self- parotic pelicans crash into this peculiar gas

00:32:10 unnecessarily hard it seems to me like pics at pickaxes rarely coming up with anything to show for it and going off with enormous elbowing black and white Mana War Birds soar on imp palpable drafts and open their tails like like scissors on the curves of or tents or or sorry um imp palpable drafts and open their tails like scissors on the curves or tense them like wishbones till they tremble the fry sponge boats keep coming

00:32:44 in with the obliging air of retrievers bristling with Jack straw gaffs and hooks and decorated with bobles of sponges there is a fence of chicken wire along the dock where linting like little plowshares the blue gray shark tailes are hung up to dry for the Chinese restaurant trade some of the little white boats are still piled up against each other or lie on their sides stove in and not yet

00:33:16 salvaged if they ever will be from the last bad storm like torn open unanswered letters the bite is littered with old correspondences click click goes the dredge and brings up a dripping jaw full of Marl and all the untidy activity continues awful but cheerful and I love uh Bishop's gift for

00:33:47 bringing important information into a poem through simile the unobtrusive mode that allows the world to be the world while the poet introduces her own thoughts so the The crucial information here of the uh the unopened uh letters torn open uh torn open unanswered letters and um the uh allusions there to correspondences not only interpersonal but she was a great reader at this time of the poet bodair

00:34:18 who had a poem called correspondance and so she's introducing uh a conversation with bodair about the nature of the symbol uh but in this this most subtle and and um and delicate way the last line by the way um and I I maybe one of my colleagues here can tell the story of how this happened but the last line all the untidy activity continues awful but cheerful is engraved in her tombstone so it uh it continues you know I just

00:34:48 wanted to say that in rereading her poems for today uh one of the things that impressed me the most was the incredibly remarkable balance of tension between words that we could call happy yeah and words that we could call scary right or Grim Grim yes and and and this is an excellent example of it it's usually done in imagery right in descriptors but here the last line awful and cheerful you know brings it up

00:35:19 almost to a level of abstraction exactly that that tension that is always there in the poems right right you know when you were talking about her um we brought up her love of naming things I really feel that was imprinted early on with her love of Hopkins Pi Beauty and all trades their gear and tackle and trms know and the sounds uh sounds yeah of this poem is just full of fabulous sounds a mix of the Anglo I

00:35:51 meaning the word the bite itself has that kind of wonderful Anglo-Saxon going to say am I interrupting no I was going to say that we talk about her eyes so much and everyone does but her ears not so bad she really is living in sound the whole time I think don't you right and in this poem sound and sight slip together we have that synesthesia where the blue gas turns TOA music that's right that's wonderful yeah yeah

00:36:22 [Music] um by the way Lloyd has reprinted in the library of America Edition the entire correspondence with an Stevenson which is really like a primer for her yeah it's just one of the few places where she is actually talking about about her life and even in the in that extraordinary correspondence with Robert L that you know 700 page

00:36:52 correspondence that reads like a you know Victorian novel it's so gripping uh but she doesn't really talk about talk very much about her personal history her background and they're really talking about more immediate things absolutely riveting and heartbreaking but it is that one place where I think she was really she was concerned enough to have you know that after being you know she'd

00:37:25 won some prizes and she was is being published in the New Yorker you know she had a career but she was also living in Brazil and I think this was she was just vulnerable enough to be willing to answer an Stevenson's questions yeah and also she said you know she sometimes wrote as many as 40 letters a day and she describe that as uh sort of working without really

00:37:56 working know just let me let me just say you know for people who may not know the biographical data um Elizabeth Bishop had the most dramatically tragic Early Childhood uh her her father died when she was 8 months old her mother I don't know what the story is there about her her mother's Mental Illness but she was hospitalized and institutionalized when Elizabeth herself was five correct and then she went to live with grandparents and I think there was some shuffling

00:38:27 back and fourth between the sets of grandparents was there a custody battle also no no but but but the parents on the Father's Side they uh they eventually understood that it was she she got asthma there and she she said that she felt about on the same level as the Dogo well she was living with her maternal grandparents yes in Nova Scotia in a small town in Nova Scotia and really enjoying herself as a kid

00:39:00 yeah and um her maternal grandparents were not at all wealthy I mean just maybe barely lower middle class he was a Tanner yeah right working family and uh living in this little cottage uh in a small town in Nova Scotia Bishop's father's family were

00:39:30 wealthy people from Worcester uh Bishops paternal grandfather owned a uh um Construction Construction Company who built you know the Boston Public Library and Symphony Hall I mean they were really major not Architects but but Builders Builders and the the grandparents felt that you know their granddaughter

00:40:01 living in this kind of practically on a farm running around the streets of uh of uh Great Village the ironic name of the city great V Great Village uh running around Barefoot and bringing cows out into the meadow and playing tricks this was not what their granddaughter daughter ought to be brought up to be and they essentially they didn't exactly abduct

00:40:33 her but they came it was an an agreement and they brought Elizabeth to Worcester where she was absolutely miserable and as Alice said developed asthma developed eczema that never the as she almost died of asthma a number of times over her whole life the eczema never was completely cured it was always

00:41:05 recurring and and finally the grandparents kind of had to admit that they had really made a mistake and kind of farmed Elizabeth out to her the aunt is that when she her aunt her mother's sister who was living in Rivier Massachusetts one of the suburbs and then they paid for she went to the Walnut Hill school and then to Vasser so they certainly paid for a absolutely first grade

00:41:37 education but at a at a great cost uh to Bishop and one of she was so sick when she first got there they had to carry her up the stairs and she didn't go to school until she was 15 or something like that and that's her aunt got got her Long Fellow in Wordsworth and Blake hkin she entered those poems and and one little detail about her mother being institutionalized was that Elizabeth was not allowed to ever

00:42:11 visit her mother and in you know they thought this was what Psychiatry was in 1918 that it would be too upsetting uh to Elizabeth's mother mother to see her daughter so she was absolutely forbidden to see her so once her mother was you know taken away and institutionalized Bishop never saw her

00:42:42 again so you know that yeah met mm well suddenly she has this new sort of surate mother in Maran Moore met mm mother died graduated you know that that well there's the awful cheerful again awful exactly and for those in the audience who are not terribly familiar with Bishop there are some beautiful poems in which she explores her childhood very famously the poem

00:43:12 CA uh the poem in the waiting room uh she's a great poet of childhood and memory um she's also a great poet of travel and landscape and um and sometimes those things to come come together but uh but I think this terrible terrible suffering um not that it's uh consolation but for us it's a gift that she was able to transform it into something very beautiful and some of the best poems of Bishops I think are about childhood and memory I was I I I I

00:43:44 wanted to read a poem also but that goes that come goes a little later and I mean this isn't a childhood poem but it's a poem about Brazil and Brazil she she she never intended to stay in Brazil but on her first visit she got very sick she was going to travel around Cape Horn on a Norwegian fraer and she got as far as Brazil and she was visiting the boat was docking for a

00:44:16 couple of weeks and she was going to visit these two acquaintances of hers that whom she'd met in New York a Brazilian woman and her American partner uh and she this and this was connected to the asthma and the and the eczema she ate a piece of cashew fruit the fruit that the nuts are cashew nuts are in and had a violent you know allergic reaction

00:44:49 anaphylactic shock and had to be hospitalized and she blew up she couldn't breathe her throat was constricted she missed the boat and fell in love with the Brazilian woman and the Brazilian woman L de deaso Suarez came from an aristocratic family had some money said stay I'll build you a studio uh and come to my home you know

00:45:21 recuperate in This Magnificent home in the in the mountain and that was it it really kind of saved her life right after she had that miserable year as as a consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress uh the what the old name for poet laurat and she really for many years she had a really great life in Brazil and then things for various

00:45:53 complicated reasons including political and the the commitments of L to Public Works and she was building a park in Rio it's the most beautiful Park in Rio now but it it essentially it killed her and uh the relationship began to deteriorate and Bishop left Bishop left Brazil and um it's so tragic story are you going to read a rival I'm going

00:46:24 to read pink dog oh oh good which is a poem that she started when she started on the verge of leaving Brazil I think the original title of this poem was farewell to Rio and then she changed the title to pink dog it took her 20 years to finish it and it was actually it was the very it wasn't the last poem she started I hope Jean is going to read the last poem she started son it oh I am uh but it's

00:46:57 the last published in the last year it's the last poem she finished it was actually the last poem that that she succeeded in finishing and it just I wanted to read it because it it says so such a wonderful example of the things that Bonnie was talking about before the the the images of of the city and then the awful but cheerful in a kind of extreme because there's a

00:47:28 really bitter joke yeah in in the poem and then the sound effects where she's actually imitating the sound of a Samba and I think it's my theory that this is her parody of the girl from EMA that and and really you can almost you can almost sing this to the music of the girl from when did that song get

00:47:59 published well that was in the 60s and it was written by a close friend of hers venisha de marage who is a very famous poet and actor and she translated him lady ladies man so she she translated him but we have to say her translation of Venus's sonnet of intimacy Bishop was so proud of it you know people have this image of her as this very Prim you know Miss Bishop

00:48:32 people called her Miss Bishop that translation had the word ended with the word piss and it was the first time a four-letter word had ever appeared in a poem in the New Yorker and Bishop was so proud of this I mean she really bragged about it uh but this let me read this poem I think it's I think it's one of her most

00:49:02 amazing poems pink dog Rio de Janeiro and remember in the girl from epema begins with this beautiful Brazilian woman in a bikini Crossing the the avenita Atlantica to go to the beach uh pink dog the sun is blazing and the sky is blue umbrellas clothe the beach in every Hue naked you Trot across the

00:49:35 Avenue oh never have I seen a dog so bare naked and pink without a single hair startled the passers by draw back and stare of course they're mortally afraid of rabies you are not mad you have a case of scabies but look intelligent where are your babies a nursing mother by those hanging

00:50:05 teets in what slum have you hidden them poor while you go begging living by your wits didn't you know it's been in all the papers to solve this problem how they deal with Beggars they take and throw them in the tidal Rivers yes idiots paralytics parasites go bobbing in the ebbing sewage nights out in the

00:50:35 suburbs where there are no lights if they do this to anyone who begs drugged drunk or sober with or without legs what would they do to sick four-legged dogs in the cafes and on the sidewalk Corners the joke is going around that all the Beggars who can afford them now wear life preservers in your condition you would

00:51:06 not be able even to float much less to dog paddle now look the Practical the sensible solution is to wear a Fantasia tonight you simply can't afford to be a Nur but no one will ever see a dog in moscara this time of year Ash Wednesday come but Carnival is here what sambas

00:51:36 can you dance what will you wear they say that Carnival is degenerating radios Americans or something have ruined it completely they're just talking Carnival is always wonderful a depilated dog would not look well dress up dress up and dance at carnival she actually breaks the line in

00:52:10 the middle of the word an a n you simply can't afford to be at Nur and the N is on the beginning of the next line it's like Glenn's Glen's Falls so should should we read song for the rainy season oh yes which um kind of describes her almost in in anticipation of the the end of the paradisical time in right in

00:52:42 Brazil um that's a poem I wish were a lot better known I think it's wonderful she talked about um pacing by the little um spring uh by their home and that the maid would be uh she she said what what must she think of me as I go back repeating phrases over and over and I can't help thinking how did she feel when she came up with hidden oh hidden in the high fog the house we live

00:53:14 in song for the rainy season hidden oh hidden in the high fog the house we live in beneath the magnetic rock rain rainbow ridden where blood black romeas lyans owls and the lint of the waterfalls cling familiar unbidden in a dim age of water the brook sings loud from a rib cage of giant Fern Vapor climbs up the Thick Growth effort

00:53:46 effortlessly turns back holding them both house and rock in a private Cloud at night on the roof blind drops crawl and the ordinary brown owl gives us proof he can count five times always five he stamps and takes off after the fat frogs that shrilling for love clamor and mount house open house to the white Dew and the milk white Sunrise kind to the eyes to membership of silverfish

00:54:17 Mouse bookworms big moths with a wall for the Milo's ignorant map darkened and tarnished by the warm touch of the warm breath Immaculate cherished Rejoice for a later era will differ o difference that kills or intimidates much of all our small shadowy life without water the great Rock will stare unmagnetized be no longer wearing rainbows or rain the

00:54:50 forgiving air and the high fog gone the owls will move on and the several waterfalls shrivel in the steady Sun she saw it coming I mean it's you're that wonderful description of how of just this open H was a modern house with glass walls and you know it was just you almost couldn't tell where the house ended and the and the you know rainforest yeah she had

00:55:22 that wonderful description uh in a letter saying it's it's all part of the really lofty vagueness of Brazil where a cloud is entering my living room right this minute right one of the things that that poem brings out and actually all the poems we've read bring out brings out is um how often uh her poems engage animal life and the uh I mean in the case of pink dog in a most sort

00:55:54 of uh parable way I mean dog identifying of course yeah pink dog is is is sort of an allegorical figure there but but there's a Continuum I think then all the animals in Bishop are both they're they're they're figures from a kind of the unconscious life of of the world but there are also surrogates for the poet her way into to get closer to that unconscious life of the world and so she's a great poet of animals and

00:56:25 encounters with animals in a way very different from other poets Maran Moore for instance where there is much more the sense of of writing fables in the asop tradition um or else scientific uh uh tracts even you know which U feature articles on animals uh Bishops animals have this this wonderful otherness and yet communication with the human world or or resonance with the human world and the owls and so on in that scene I think bring that out really

00:56:55 really well yeah she loved the number five always five um which reminds me just a back to that thing about her vision and what a curse as well as what a blessing is in a in a in a Pros poem called rainy season subtropics there's a section called giant toad which begins

00:57:27 well close at the near the beginning my eyes bulge and hurt they are my one great Beauty even so they see too much above below and yet there is not much to see yeah those are extraordinary I love those oh Jean well I was just thinking I don't know if this is obvious but I just say it in case it isn't uh that seems to me

00:58:01 that the eye the the everything she saw all around her probably from when she was born was a way of connecting uh and and locating herself in the world and I think her Rhymes were like that too I was thinking before we came today that I I don't really have anything to say about her Rhymes except that but it seemed to me they were comfort in to her as they are to us as readers uh rhyme always is I think it's

00:58:32 it's either very emphatic only or comforting but um she has I I was first reading her when I was very young luckily uh had her North and South and a Cold Spring in my raincoat pocket when I was in college because somebody told me read Miss Bishop we called everybody that then I mean all the women Miss Moore you it's ridiculous but anyway uh I did have that book and I would be so struck by her Rhymes cuz I wasn't sure

00:59:02 it's in 1956 if you should Rhyme or not who knew anyway nobody could tell you but she was rhyming uh almost it seemed without effort and I guess that's how all great poets do but in a wonderful fluid have my back to you excuse me in a wonderfully fluid way I mean I I think of the Fantastic use of rhyme in something like the moose yeah where you know it's not a rhyme scheme but often she's rhyming words of Nature and words

00:59:34 and human world words so um you know Birches and churches yes so that there's this beautiful integration that can happen in the place of rhyme master and disaster well she stole that one from wh aen but you know when you say that um reminded me of something now I can't think what um oh I know what it was that I have a friend who's very very good at writing formal verse Joan Lin and she has said

01:00:07 that and this probably gave me the idea of this thing of seeing and and hearing too uh Joan said she does a crown of sonets about some painful subject and she said it's like a handhold through the pain for her to have the rhyme scheme very tight rhyme scheme in that case but I think by the time of the Moose she probably didn't even have to think about it oh no you know it was so probably in her body by I'm sure she did think about it but you know yeah she said to a friend of mine

01:00:40 I'm going to stop in a minute but she said to a friend of mine Ellena Ros Taylor very wonderful poet that you know Alice Alice I mean excuse me uh Elizabeth had just done a reading and so Ellena a poet too came up to her and said I just love that poem The Moose it's just I don't it's just a miraculous poem cuz we all feel that but um Elizabeth's I think this characteristic from what I know said it's just what

01:01:12 happened you know and that's a very telling thing as well as a sort of fun anecdote I think of her modesty but I think I think she liked what happened yeah yeah as well as of course the pain but I think it gave her her life yeah I F Capa and she heard somebody saying afterwards not bad for a poem for also it was introduced by the Provost or whoever was

01:01:45 in charge of that reading as Elizabeth Bishop will now read her new poem the moo the Moose right she got a lot of mileage out of out of that too but I was thinking hearing you talk about about because I'm hoping you will read Sonet I want to because the Rhymes are so intricate and they're often not all the Rhymes are at the ends of the words but they're kind of buried

01:02:16 in the middles of in the middle of the ends of lines but buried in the middles of lines and there's so much Play If I think if you just heard the poem you couldn't actually tell where the lines were supposed to end because they're so playful and tricky and I think that's so beautiful and I think that's how she got to be don't you I mean you knew her so but it feels to me like she just did it all her life and that's how she got to

01:02:47 be do you think she just I don't know son it and well I'll read it caught the bubble in the spirit level a creature divided and the compass needle wobbling and wavering undecided freed the broken thermometers Mercury running away and the rainbow

01:03:17 bird from the narrow bevel of the empty mirror flying wherever it feels like gay beautiful that was the poem that ran in the New Yorker after Bishop died and there was some conversation between Alice methfessel and Howard because a bishop had corrected that poem uh by phone and origin and the manuscript as it as it was in galle in the New Yorkers said caught the bubble in the spirit

01:03:49 level contrarily guided not a creature divided and then she changed it but Howard had to testify to that really such a good change and mirrors were very important to Bishop and um in in her early notebook she had this wonderful entry age 23 a woman sat um let me see oh her Wicked mirror took her face crumpled it quickly and flung it

01:04:20 back and she loved inversions um I mean you were we were talking about rhyme and of course as as you well know um sonnet is an upside down sonnet it's not only a very narrow sonnet two beats instead of the full uh iic pentameter so but it's it's it's it's uh yeah it's not8 and six in the traditional sonnet form but but it's the upside down um six and eight so uh she's playing with inversion in all kinds of ways and uh and yet it never

01:04:51 feels contrived I think that's what you were saying about the the kind of it just seems to just seems to happen isn't there an image in one of the poems that takes place in Brazil in which the person has to find a mirror that's never been looked into yes that's the river man right oh the Riverman that's right yeah that's a imagines herself as as a um a shaman type figure yes there's also a poem called an earlier poem called insomnia about the moon in the bureau

01:05:21 mirror and looking into the mirror as a as a a world inverted even the phrase is inverted um where day is always night and forget what the list of thing is and the last line in this inverted world is and you love me oh that's true those were the only poems that she sort of openly said it's about a love affair about a failed love affair the beautiful poem

01:05:52 conversation until a name and all its connotation mean the same just so beautiful um well I'd kind of like to recite Sandpiper her selfportrait thinking about all of her travels and that and that fat pan that fat sputtering in the pan um so the only reference I think is to Blake to see the world in a grain of sand and Eternity in an hour uh so Sandpiper The Roaring alongside he takes for granted and that every so often the

01:06:24 world is bound to shake he runs he runs to the South finical awkward in a state of controlled Panic a student of Blake the beach hisses like fat on his left an interrupting sheet of water a sheet of interrupting water comes and goes and glazes over his dark and brittle feet he runs he runs straight through it watching his toes watching rather the spaces of sand between them where no detail too small

01:06:55 the Atlantic drains backwards and downwards as he runs he stares at the dragging grains the world is aist and then the world is minute and vast and clear the tide is higher or lower he couldn't tell you which his beak is focused he is preoccupied looking for something something something poor bird he is obsessed the millions of grains are Black White tan and brown mixed with quartz grains Rose and amethyst

01:07:26 gray not brown black white tan and gray mixed with I love that poem so much speak as Focus he is preoccupied thank um Elliot Carter the late Elliot Carter who recently died at almost 104 still writing um wrote a song cycle of based on Elizabeth Bishop poems and Sandpiper is is in that cycle and he knew that

01:07:59 that was an autobiographical poem and so the Sandpiper in his setting is um is played by an OBO which was Carter's own instrument so he was mirroring her autobiograph autobiography in his autobi autobiography and searching for something something something the world is minute and vast both which is seems

01:08:33 very Bishop the shift and scale that we're always talking about that's so it's so vibrant when a poet does that she didn't like the setting she didn't like Carter's setting she didn't get it the other thing about the the Sandpiper um and insomnia and many of her poems is that she had this conversation with the tradition of poetry um she was deeply read but not uh

01:09:04 at all showy about her her reading uh not a poet that uh requires footnotes she didn't like footnotes uh but there's there are conversations going on with poetry of the past um not for the purpose of displaying audition or uh you know particular narrow uh kind of Mastery but just because the the conversation one of the things poetry is for is to conduct a conversation over

01:09:35 time and so insomnia has a conversation with sir Philip Sydney's famous poem address to the moon and of course Blake's augies of innocence in um in the Sandpiper and um she quotes a Herbert line in waiting at well Fleet although she doesn't say who she's quoting and it doesn't matter if you don't know the poem is completely is complete by itself without that knowledge but there's this uh layer that is pleasing to those of us

01:10:07 who do know the poems of the past and and it just reminds us that that poetry exists in those two dimensions of the contemporaneity and the long vertical um tradition feeling of of of the tradition speaking of Herbert do you all know the Herbert dream she had you you all do I she she dreamed uh that Herbert appeared to her in his in her dream and with his curls and his Scarlet uh shirt I'll say uh and he said

01:10:40 to her I can help you isn't that nice 17th century priest I wish I'd get one like that but I do believe he did he did you know he really did after L died she carried her with her and even and in Camp when she was a little girl I think she had her yeah talking about George Herbert the excuse great 17th century poet I think I I didn't say that to be it reminds me too that something that we haven't mentioned I don't think but

01:11:11 which appears also in many of her poems um sort of not too obviously is the architecture of the church uh or maybe a personage of the church uh she doesn't make a big point about it but when she's describing her Landscapes there's a Spire right she's qualifying whether it's bir cage like the Jesuit Church yes she does do you know that house oh excuse me no goad no go ahead the house in Great Village in Nova Scotia is right next to the church

01:11:42 and she had an amazing which with quite a high Spire for Great Village and uh she had an amazing thing that she says somewhere and I don't remember where but if you tell touched this is after her mother had had the scream the she wrote a beautiful story wasn't it a story called The Scream about the in the village in the village in the village it's called and yeah the L porn was called the scream I think anyway it's about a moment of breakdown of her

01:12:12 mother when she's being fitted for a dress and it's a beautiful beautiful story if you get the chance to read it I think the first words in the story are the scream the scream maybe that's it oh okay well I I think it's in there that she talks about the church steeple and if you put your finger on the church steeple it would be the screen it's amazing yeah that is that is the image it is the image it be like a tuning like a yeah it would make the screen but when

01:12:45 you mentioned the church she was right next to that church for those years you know she has the Baptist HS to the seal lot you can hear so uh someone for poetry has the the Cadence of Dickinson who got her cadences from the hymns and you can see that that carry over as well yeah but there is this sort of quiet Compass you know where the church is being found in the landscape in many poems I think comes up that way ambivalently sometimes

01:13:17 yes Catholicism I think she had her reservations yeah the the gold and the Vatican made her s uh I think there I was looking through the early notebooks to see if I could share some things and I think that one of the things that about Bishop's poems there's always she has a good sense of drama and you know that's where the mystery comes in and there was this little tiny fragment again she's 24

01:13:48 years old here in New York 1934 when we walked across the bridge the Sun particularized certain Windows off the river if you should go to such a place at such a Time burst in and say it's great and that's what she took from seeing that window that's wonderful these notebooks are

01:14:18 great does did she she never tried to write a play did she she read a lot of plays in the public Library there's a lot of dialogue in her poems built in she was she did translate the birds the M that's right of course and she Elizabeth and masks she dren and such she was reading yeah her youth but she never tried to write a an original play no she wrote everything else I think didn't she and she loved loved loved witty people wit was very important to

01:14:51 her and I think she said that Pauline Hemingway was the wittiest person that she had ever known but um she in one of the letters or maybe to Ann Stevenson I think she said I've I've been lucky in my life I've known some very very witty people and what the um what's the line in in in one art at the end of one art the the joking voice the gesture the gesture all that but the joking so important and that the the the

01:15:21 the the you know the two most serious relationships that she had most most serious is the wrong word but the two really biggest deepest relationships that she had were with W with people who were very witty and entertained her La allegedly I mean I never knew L but Alice methfessel who was you know very funny very amusing person No

01:15:53 Nonsense really not very interested in poetry but who who could make Elizabeth laugh that's great um there was a there's a little visual um anecdote that Bishop wrote in her notebooks since about her friend Margaret Miller who she loved very deeply in school and college and um Margaret ended up at the Museum of Modern Art as a curator and uh I think one of the authors was schwitters

01:16:23 catalog oh anyway this is Margaret leaned out of the car um with a comb in her hand and pretended to comb the round chromium Dome of the spotlight then she tied a scarf around its head you just you see that she was so you mentioned schitter and schitts and Paul clay who are two of the wittiest artists were also two of her

01:16:55 favorite artists she loved yeah well I Bishop didn't write a a vast amount of poetry the collected Bishop isn't isn't that big well it's bigger now than it was before but I mean what she allowed to be published wasn't very much but um as some of you may know she was a great letter writer I think you already mentioned uh and her sense of humor in the letters is just fantastic um I remember I think they'll be like Byron's later on they'll publish

01:17:26 them in 13 volumes or she'd she'd see um there's a wonderful description in Key West of um uh two Pelicans on a um some kind of um Boardwalk or something and uh a blowfish they they they they swooped down and and grabbed a blowfish and one of them had swallowed it and Blowfish um expand so it started to expand inside the gullet of this Pelican and he spit bit it out like a she said like a basketball to the

01:17:57 other Pelican and so they started playing basketball with the with the Blowfish and you know Bishop's Eye for that kind of the sense of the delightfully absurd I mean in the poem The Bite I think you see a lot of that where the you know the the birds coming back with like the like the like obliging retrievers you know and there's just it's just very comic a comic sense of life that she didn't like appearing in public and didn't enjoy giving

01:18:27 readings and she made a number of recordings and there were a number of recordings not many there are a number of recordings of her of her reading and and they're not very good and they they certainly don't capture the quality of the poem or her quality um you know there was a PBS series called voices and Visions some years a a few decades ago now and the producers of the series actually

01:18:59 got the actress blly Danner to read her poems because they couldn't stand the way Bishop read I think it was a serious mistake you wanted to hear Bishop's voice and bl Tanner I hope she's not here today didn't hadn't really worked on the poems very much but there is one recording and it's on uh on JD MCL there's a a tape I don't know if it's on

01:19:29 I don't even know if it's on C but there's a tape of Bishop reading and there's one reading one poem that she reads and it's a comic poem called Filling Station where she herself actually Chuckles at one of the jokes and for me it's the only recording of hers that actually sounds like the person I no because she was so stiff as a reader but her just her little giggle

01:20:02 can I read Filling Station it's this is a poem there's a book called questions of travel it's her third book and it's divided into two parts one part is called Brazil and the second part is called elsewhere and palm filling station is in the elsewhere section and I always assumed that it was the in station across the street from her grandmother's house in Great Village but in the letters to Anne Stevenson she says it's

01:20:32 in Brazil it's on this deserted Road in in Brazil I mean I I I just discovered this myself but I still think of it as oh yeah Great Village Filling Station anywhere or yeah right Filling Station oh but it is dirty this little filling station oil soaked oil permeated to a disturbing overall black translucency be careful with that

01:21:06 match father wears a dirty oil soaked monkey suit that cuts him under the arms and several quick and Saucy and greasy Suns assist him it's a family Filling Station all quite thoroughly dirty do they live in the station it's the question do they live in the station it has a cement porch behind the pumps and on it a set of crushed and grease

01:21:37 impregnated wicker work on the Wicker sofa a dirty dog quite comfy some comic books provide the only note of color of certain color they lie upon a big dim do draping a taboret part of the set behind a big ha suit beona I think that's where she giggles why the extraneous

01:22:08 plant why the tabaret why oh why the doily embroidered in Daisy Stitch with margarites I think and heavy with gray crochet somebody embroidered the doily somebody Waters the plant or Oils it maybe somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly

01:22:40 Sayo so so so to high strung automobiles somebody loves us all that's so wonderful she told me that so so so was what you said to horses if you're in a in a buggy and the horse gets upset that this is what you say to calm the horses down so like when cars

01:23:13 started coming into these country towns yeah and that that's what so this Esso it's not just the joke on Esso but that there's also this that's great to know you know unfortunately we only have less than 10 minutes and I want to give people from the audience an opportunity to comment or ask questions if anyone wants to say something please come up to the microphone so we can get you on the recording love thank you very

01:23:51 much well first thank you this this was this was really wonderful and enlightening and informative I knew her poetry and I didn't know anything really about her I've had this book forever and um my name is Merl malavsky by the way and one thing I would like to add to the commentary on the or wonder actually why it wasn't

01:24:22 mentioned was her social Consciousness particularly her Brazil poems which uh well like the pink dog which is very powerful but also I'm not going to read it I'm just going to read the titles squatter's children and most profoundly the one that moves me the most is the burglar of Babylon and I'm thinking of her generation and The Poets who were socially conscious like Muriel

01:24:53 ruckheiser and our every generation needs uh poets to comment and remind us and consolidate our awareness and I'm going to do a tiny plug which is I'm going to be doing I'm not don't you don't have to you know I'm not saying write this down but I am going to be doing a uh presentation at NYU in June that's sponsored by Cleo psyche it's their conference and I'll be

01:25:24 part of a panel on psychoanalysis and poetry and I think it's very important for psychoanalysts to recognize what poetry actually means in a world uh in an internet instant access world and to remember that the poets always spoke for an entire culture so thank you for this thank you you

01:25:54 you know there's there's something that I thought this psychoanalytically oriented Among Us would be interested to hear this is again from the early notebook if I stretch my thought to Egypt to India downtown it is in my thought I see them and they are not at the time reality for me if I go to these places it's a different matter reality then is something like a huge circus tent f buing adjustable which we carry

01:26:26 around with us and set up wherever we are it possesses the magical property of being able to take on the characteristics of whatever place we are in in fact it can become identical with it that's such an interesting circus tent though hello um my name is James Simon and I want to thank the speakers and I also wanted to ask if we know anything about her process from the her notebooks did she write in the morning did she write at night did she write write every day I hear that she wrote a lot of

01:26:56 letters but you know how did because she didn't write many poems that we know of that's number one and number two mlat she mentions that she was a chronic alcoholic so I did that do you have any comments about that well she wasn't an alcoholic I don't think to the extent say that barryman you know people didn't worry about her the way they I mean they worried about her in her in her in her personal life but not to step up to the microphone and completely lose it but

01:27:28 yeah I mean particularly in her 40s in Key West it was her friends were terrified and she took antabuse in Brazil for that definitely it was a huge part of her life and I think if you it's in the Poetry definitely and the process I mean there's certainly been references to her waiting for decades to get a word for a poem isn't that true where you know she had the idea for a poem and she'd sort of leave a space I think well L's poem about her talks about the her I wish I could

01:28:01 quote it now waiting decades for the for the perfect word and you who make the Casual perfect you yeah right there are manuscripts you can look at uh for instance at Harvard there's a poem called cruso at home you know is a draft of of uh of of um the later poem there's many examples of her REO in England the Moose pink

01:28:31 dog among her masterpieces are poems that took her decades to complete the maybe her most famous poem one art the villain L and this very complicated form took her a week and we have all the drafts which Alice has uh reprinted in Edgar alen Poe in the Jukebox they are amazing because you see the first version is almost pros and

01:29:02 it's a it's all over the place and she instantly figures out that it needs to be in a form and she is desperate she this is a breakup of of this relationship with Alice methfessel and and she is on the verge of suicide and maybe has even even makes a a maybe halfhearted suicide attempt in the process and that poem working on that palem I have an absolute conviction has

01:29:35 kept her alive and and um what this is one art one art one art another side of her more comical maybe side of her process as a young writer and many Young Writers do this um uh we mentioned that uh that Maran Moore was was very important to her so so not only uh did they meet and become friends but they became they developed a mentor Protegé relationship and she would send things to maryan Moore and maryan Moore

01:30:05 would kindly retype them with lots of changes and so at a certain point Bishop decided to back off from that particular side of the writing process of showing Maryann Moore everything that she wrote well there's there's a notorious story where uh Bishop wrote maybe the most ambitious of her early poems called roosters it's in her first book and she a war poem a war poem yeah and she sent it to Maran Moore and it has those triple Rhymes uh as like pink

01:30:40 dog and she was doing something rather daring almost writing a kind of nursery rhyme but it's a very serious and very ambitious poem and Marian Moore really didn't get what she was doing and didn't like the triple Rhymes and also wanted her to change the title to the right not a good idea not a good idea let me just hold up for a second I know that a couple of our participants

01:31:11 had to like catch buses and things at 3:30 you're okay okay so we can go a little bit longer okay we'll let people have their chance thank you okay I had an opportunity to look at and listen to the the um PBS special which is for anybody's information online it's marvelous is it oh I hour get it online full hour no interruptions it's all right so um I learned a lot last night preparing to be an audience member and listening I wanted to know a little bit

01:31:43 more about the character of Friday apparently was a real person because at one point they made reference to the fact that she bemoaned the fact that he had passed away of the measles so what do we know about this Friday person well I've always taken that to be a kind of again it's she's doing the Robinson cruso Story and Friday of course is the character in Robinson cruso and I think it's her veiled reference to

01:32:16 L of deaso Suarez um that is this was the in her loneliness this is the person who comes and rescues her is that the woman relationship with the woman yes and I mean in you know in cruso in England cruso is a man Friday is a man they talk about oh if only they could have had children you know it's not a it's not

01:32:47 exactly an allegory of you know one to one but I think that's sort of in in my mind that's sort of where Friday comes in and that it's really and the Palm ends with the death of Friday and it's so heartbreaking because I think that's who she's thinking of and lot and L of probably committed suicide I want to push back just a little though because I I tend to I I think many poems come from

01:33:18 personal experience but I worry when we reduce poems to autobiography I mean the cruso story is one of the great archetypal stories of Western culture and all of that is important and Friday represents the native he represents the other world the third world as it was called then and uh and he represents a a relationship to uh the landscape and to the place that crusa doesn't have and that that's Universal

01:33:49 and so I worry when we we always want to bring fiction back to facts you know that we miss really one of the great goals of poetry is to share this yeah so it's not to to contradict anything that's been said but just to open but I think that's that's probably where it comes from but that we have to see it as we have to see the story as the it's all it's all those things I think you know I think it makes sense to think of her and uh it's just like in the Moose you know I think there's an

01:34:20 autobiographical element when she overhears the conversation about the grandparents in eternity and about someone who's a drinker you know that's her way of bringing in that story you know she's overhearing it right and that's a wonderful way of bringing in the drinking I think cuz I I didn't want to understate the the importance of that in her life it was a big project of lotas to help her combat that problem I she was a very cheap drunk so you mean it didn't take her much to get drunk right yeah so she

01:34:51 could you know and she knew this but so if she had a a drink it wasn't going to stop there because she would immediately get drunk and then she would keep drinking and she would go on binges but in a way the question about whether she was an alcoholic is becomes more complicated because she wasn't always drunk and there were just there were you know long periods while she was on antibus for a while

01:35:24 here from time to time but there were also periods when she just wasn't drinking and where she was completely lucid and writing poems and you know maybe she would have written more poems if she didn't have these binges and it was a drinking generation of writers they all drinking okay yes how do you think she might have interacted or fared in a world like ours today with Facebook and

01:35:55 talk shows and self-exposure do you think um and do you think that there could be an Elizabeth Bishop who fully interacts electronically today oh I hope you know I hope so but I don't think she I can't imagine Elizabeth on Facebook she famously said closets closets and more closets yeah so um well but even just the The Disappearance

01:36:27 of or the erosion of the idea of territoriality and regionality Because the Internet is connecting everybody how do you think she might that's what I was going to say is I have a poet friend who's Wills on the whole thing uh electronically and I said I don't really do much of it and uh she said but jean you can talk to a poet anywhere in the world and you can read their poems anywhere on our little Globe you can that must have fascinated Bishop if she

01:36:58 had gotten that goodh and they could have read her well now people in Ireland you can't graduate from high school without uh learning 10 poems of Elizabeth Bishop I mean out of aund I think um in in the realm of uh photography and and documentary I've sometimes had to talk to students and when I wanted to point out uh an artist

01:37:30 who was um to talk about the issue of sentimentality I send them to um Helen levit and it occurred to me today if you know Helen lit's work that there's something very akin to Bishop in the sense that they're artists who were resolutely unsentimental I think occasionally fierce but never mean and there's also this there's always this you know there's always this love of the world so I I just it occurred to me this connection I thought I would there's a one of her wonderful unpublished poems

01:38:05 uh is her poem about Buster Keaton called Keaton which is and it just absolutely figures that Keaton of all the screen comedians or the silent comedians would be the one who was most attractive to Bishop and the last line of that poem is I am not sentimental and it starts out I think I will be good and what Helen levit loves is

01:38:36 ordinary people just people in the street and animals and children and children especially and if you want to know about the world look at children and watch them interacting on the street and she certainly had that I think it's a great combination she would have loved that I always think of Walker Evans when I think of filling station though it's like a Walker Evans photograph only the tone is a little different right all right well we've gone over about almost 15 minutes well it speaks

01:39:11 to thank you to hear you thank you I just want everybody for coming and to thank this wonderful wonderful group I think Elizabeth Bishop has gotten an appreciation